What if some petitioners fail to provide a complete address?
In Skaggs v. Fyffe, 266 Ky. 337, 98 S.W.2d 884 (1936), the court held that the provisions of the local option statute requiring petitioners to state their address and date of signing were directory rather than mandatory, and therefore the names of petitioners should be counted even if they omitted the address or date entirely. (The term directory is not often used in modern legal writing; in current usage one would state that the provisions of the statute do not require strict compliance.) The court reasoned as follows: The provisions of the local option law in the particular under examination can be, as to the address, only for the purpose of readily or conveniently identifying the petitioners as being of the class having the right to apply for the holding of the election, and, as to the date on which signed, only to show that it was done when they were so qualified, or, perhaps, to disclose that it was signed before the filing of the petition. That would seem to be merely to afford c
